By Dave Strohm

I first met Lars in 2001, shortly after he finished an MBA in the Sloan Program at Stanford Business School. We met to discuss what we both felt to be a major, undeveloped market in software--enabling businesses (of all sizes) to improve their business results through better goal-setting, performance management, skills assessment and succession planning; what has come to be known as Human Capital Management (HCM) software.

Lars was already passionate about this topic. In his twenties--prior to Stanford--he had achieved significant, global roles at two, leading European companies--Unilever and Novartis. Lars had come to appreciate, firsthand, the leverage on business results in optimizing the capability of his teams. He was ready to lead his own company, and especially intrigued by the opportunity to build a company that delivered this capability--for others. But the challenge we both confronted in 2001 was that no existing software company, (including the major ERP vendors) had been successful delivering this capability as "licensed" software.
Well before "SaaS" had entered our vocabulary, Lars decided that HCM should be a hosted-software business. He started SuccessFactors nearly from scratch on this basis, and over the past 8 years has built the clear, market-leading company in HCM, with more than 2600 customers, in 60 industries, in over 185 countries, and in 31 languages. SuccessFactors is used today by more than 4.5 million people in these businesses, resulting in the largest user-base of any SaaS offering.
Lars is known throughout the industry--but especially to his customers and his employees--for his passion and intensity around HCM. His mission for SuccessFactors--boldly--is to enable a global productivity increase of 50%, and a more rewarding workplace for all employees, through the rapid, pervasive deployment of the highest-quality HCM software. He has been a visionary and pioneer, both in hosted software and HCM, and is unstoppable in this mission.

David Strohm is Board Chair at SuccessFactors, and a longtime partner and software/IT venture capital investor at Greylock.


Contributions

• Video: The CEOs of SuccessFactors and CubeTree on Social Business Software - May 2010
  The CEO of SuccessFactors, Lars Dalgaard, and the CEO of CubeTree, Carlin Wiegner, discuss the power of integrating social business software with business execution solutions to help companies turbo-charge their business results.
  
  
  
• Video: The New Era of Cloud Computing - SIIA OnDemand, October 2009
  Download the Slides
  
  
  
• Article: The Time for The Cloud is Now – November 2008
  We believe computing in the cloud is real, and ready for mainstream consumption. Why? Because the big enterprise software implementations of yesterday failed, and now more than ever, companies are looking for new and easy ways to help drive productivity across its workforce. Companies spent millions looking to automate simple processes, and those big software guys just couldn’t deliver. Projects vastly exceeded budgets, took too long to complete, or just didn’t live up to what was promised.
  
  
• Video: Jack Welch and Lars Dalgaard on Strategic HR – August 2007
  The CEO of SuccessFactors Lars Dalgaard talks to Jack Welch about how HR can contribute to the bottom line. You'll laugh at the last line.